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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Peter Harvey

On the very idea of Buddhist ethics

17 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Action, Analytic Tradition, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Self

≈ 27 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, Buddhaghosa, Christopher Gowans, Damien Keown, David Chapman, John Rawls, Maria Heim, Peter Harvey, virtue ethics

I’ve recently been reading Christopher Gowans’s Buddhist Moral Philosophy: An Introduction. It is an introductory textbook of a sort that has not previously been attempted, and one that becomes particularly interesting in the light of David Chapman’s critiques of Buddhist ethics. While Gowans and Chapman would surely disagree about the value and usefulness of Buddhist ethics, they actually show remarkable agreement on a proposition that could still be quite controversial: namely, that the term “Buddhist ethics” or “Buddhist moral philosophy” names above all a Yavanayāna phenomenon. That is: the way that Gowans and Chapman use the terms “Buddhist ethics” and “Buddhist moral philosophy”, what they name is a contemporary Western (and primarily academic) activity, even if it is one conducted primarily by professed Buddhists. Continue reading →

Is “Buddhist ethics” Buddhist?

11 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Politics

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

abortion, David Chapman, Disengaged Buddhism, gender, modernity, Peter Harvey, Seth Zuihō Segall, United States

David Chapman has on his blog a provocative new series of posts about Buddhist ethics. You can get a strong sense of the tenor of these posts from their titles: “Buddhist ethics” is a fraud, “Buddhist ethics” is not Buddhist ethics, Traditional Buddhism has no ethical system, Buddhist morality is Medieval, and How Asian Buddhism imported Western ethics. Continue reading →

Trans* inclusiveness as an innovation to Buddhism

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Politics, Sex

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

conventional/ultimate, Engaged Buddhism, gender, justice, Justin Whitaker, Pali suttas, Peter Harvey, transbuddhists.org, vinaya

On his American Buddhist Perspective blog, my friend Justin Whitaker recently posted an interesting interview on the experience of trans* people in American Buddhism. Justin uses “trans*” as a shorthand for “transgender”, “transsexual”, “transvestite” and similar terms – to denote people who have become or attempted to become, in some respect, a gender different from the one associated with their biology at birth. It is clear to me that trans* people in the US face various forms of unjust discrimination. Where the tricky questions get raised is when the struggle against that injustice intersects with Buddhism – as, for that matter, when the struggle against any injustice intersects with Buddhism. Justin and I began a conversation about this in the comments to that post, and I’d like to continue that conversation in more detail here. Continue reading →

Translating puṇya and pāpa

01 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Karma, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Roman Catholicism

≈ 27 Comments

Tags

Barbra Clayton, Gregory Schopen, Harvard University, Jonathan Z. Smith, Peter Harvey, Theosophy

Classical Indian Buddhist texts rely a great deal on two concepts: puṇya (Pali puñña) and pāpa. The former is good, something to pursue; the latter is bad, something to avoid. They have something to do with our actions and their results: punya comes out of our good actions and brings good results for us, pāpa comes out of our bad actions and brings bad results. We find these concepts all over the place in pretty much any Indian Buddhist text we might pick up. Next week I’ll explore in more detail what they are and how we might best think about them. This week I want to start with something more basic: how should we translate them into English? Absolutely not, I would argue, with the two words that Buddhism scholars most commonly use for them: namely “merit” and “sin” respectively. Continue reading →

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20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada conferences Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson expressive individualism Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber law Martha Nussbaum modernity music mystical experience Pali suttas pedagogy Plato race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) technology theodicy United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

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